Spent a lot of long-overdue, late late-night hours over the past week or so, stretching my PHP, CSS and HTML skills well beyond their limits in service of some fairly substantial code optimization --- with more still to come --- in hopes of trying to make things run a bit faster here. Did I succeed?

(Note: You may need to hit SHIFT-REFRESH once or twice to get all the updated files into your cache. Other than that, if you come across any unexpected glitches or odd behavior, please let me know!)

Loads fast, looks good. One suggestion: move as much STYLE information out of the HTML and into the separate stylesheet file as possible... use more ID="..." and CLASS="...", and less repetitive STYLE="..." attributes to define how content should appear. It reduces server load, bandwidth consumption, and browser render time. Hope that helps, keep up the great work.

Today at work (win2k IE 6.0 - T3 connection) it loaded more quickly, at least enough to begin reading some articles, while the remainder still seemed to take an extra while to load.

Now at home (winXP pro IE 6.0 - dsl connection) the right-hand side "featured stories" are now loading at the top left side of the screen, pushing the actual articles of the day to the bottom left, with the ads and DVN to the bottom right, in a very strange arrangement.

...I forgot to add, at home it seems to load even faster than it did at work, so either you're working on it some more, or DSL is somehow better than a T3...

Anyway I think your efforts in this regard are worth the time, I used to surf other stuff while I waited for the page to load. Hopefully I (and others) wont have to do that anymore. The people who know this site know its worth the wait, but it might detract new visitors by being somewhat slow.